Android RNS-E

Well I took the plunge and splashed out on a new Android radio which looks like the stock unit and at $386.90 delivered I thinks it's a good price mind you the TAX man will want their pound of flesh when it arrives.

Should have it within the week and I can't wait as I hate the stock unit, it's like something from the dark ages in my book.

The option for this unit are eminence compared to the stock RNS-E:
touch screen
wifi
3G
Loads of Apps Torque being one of them
verity of different navigation:Sygic, IGO, TomTom, Route66,Google map and so on
1080p playback (not so important to me)
I can even connect a 1TB drive to it so music and videos are almost limitless
Oh and CANBUS

Once it arrives I will feed back how good it is once I have it installed.

Found an adapter lead that sorts out the speaker problem the Connects 2 CT51AU02 speakers are now perfect after trying many different options, this gives you full sound front & rear. You have to swap round the red & yellow to get the right permanent live to the unit!

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I've only just seen it today getting in to the office and I just found out I did not have to pay important duty as they sent it as a monitor worth $50..... result.

Anyway I have to say it looks good loads of connection wires including an ipod connector and a canbus decoder and a 8gb micro card all reasy fitted.

I did make a book book on my order as I ordered a duel core unit and not a quad but they assure me there is very little difference in the performance, a little gutted on that but I will get on with it.

The other is the Bluetooth pairing is locked out to any other app so I can't install my obd bluetooth dongle.

The other is the **** built in eq and poor quality. Now I know it can give out good sound as the app poweramp has a eq and that plays sweet on the bose but for everything else like the radio it reverts back to the built in eq.

Its not because of the volume knob it's more a case of the sound quality I.e. the built in eq and the lock down of the bluetooth to two apps. The knob I just think I was unlucky but then one would put it down to there quality control checks or lack of. But no right now I would say there is better options.

Mines going back due to the faulty volume knob, but I was getting there ironing out a lot of the qwerkes.

I will be ordering another unit from another supplier and have now have a wifi obd dongle to get round that issue. I found a great eq which got round the sound quality issue bar the radio which it could not override.

Thank you for honest statement of this, will be getting an android stereo, are double din installation straight forward I'm not fussed anyway I don't use the radio for anything just plug the music in and on my way!

@docurley Thanks for posting this! How are you getting on with your head unit so far? I'm about to install a similar setup, not an Audi-specific one, into my car and wonder if you had any further updates

After thinking about what I want out of my next HU, I decided to buy the one for A/S3 listed on ebay from a UK supplier in my previous comment and installed it the moment it arrived

Only messed about with it for a few hours so far and it's been relatively pain-free and managed to impress me with what it can do and how fast it is.

Biggest issue so far has been the bottom fixing brackets, which refused to disengage and release the HU with the stereo keys. I had to remove the centre trim around the coin tray, hazard and ESP buttons in order to get to the bottom of the HU and push the tabs in from underneath to take the HU out. Part of me thinks that this may be an undocumented "security" feature, but in reality it's just bad workmanship/quality control This adds a couple of extra minutes to the process of removing the unit and after figuring out how to do this, it's not that much of an issue given that once installed it will not be coming out that often.

Other than skip forward/back steering buttons not being recognised by Google Play app it's actually been very good from a functionality perspective, with radio reception being pretty decent, although I did use my own radio aerial adapter, because the included item only uses one of the OEM diversity aerials.

I've been reading the XDA developers forum section that deals with modding these units and there is a small group of people making customised OS images for them and this opens the door up to fixing much of the software issues I've experienced so far. Judging by how things are going, I'm probably going to install a rooted OS image and customise the hell out of it very soon.

Would I recommend this unit to just anyone? That would probably be a big NO... But if you like gadgets, extremely comprehensive feature set, tinkering and customising things, then this would be perfect for you as long as you accept that this will not have the quality, support (or the price tag) of any of the established HU makers.

Remember - this HU costs £340 with almost all of the adapters you need, plus none of the big names offer anything like this and if they did, it would be close to £1000!

Then there's access to any app from Google Play Store - any of the music apps for local mp3s or streaming work, so you are free to use Spotify, Soundcloud, Google Music, YouTube or many other online radio apps... The many online or offline Nav apps seem to work fine with the GPS receiver. Youi can use its built-in nav app with offline maps or Waze, Here Maps, Google Maps with on-line traffic updates and very up-to-date maps and local POI search, it all works very well and is fast

I'll throw some more updates in here as I have them, as long as OP does not mind me hijacking his thread

After thinking about what I want out of my next HU, I decided to buy the one for A/S3 listed on ebay from a UK supplier in my previous comment and installed it the moment it arrived ..................

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When you say Google Play, you mean Play Music? How are the radio apps? Do they work with the steering wheel buttons? When they scan, do they recognise station names, or do they only display frequencies?
I've been looking into these for some time, but however I have only recently purchased an Audi, previously owning an RX8.....

When you say Google Play, you mean Play Music? How are the radio apps? Do they work with the steering wheel buttons? When they scan, do they recognise station names, or do they only display frequencies?
I've been looking into these for some time, but however I have only recently purchased an Audi, previously owning an RX8.....

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Yes, I meant Google Play I since found a fix for the skip buttons being passed via a mod on XDA and will look at sorting it shortly, so may not be a problem anymore.

Radio app is OK and does support RDS, but seems to update saved station names frequently, so you will find that it sometimes loses the names because the station you saved is not accessible at that time - at least that is how it feels. Modded radio apps are floating about on XDA and these fix many of the problems people have experienced.

Another issue I have is rear speakers and sub having ground loop interference - will install a ground loop isolator to try and resolve the issue, but that will be permanently fixed soon with new speakers, sub and amp to replace the Bose stuff.

Awesome, I'll have a look out for this on xda-devs, I may end up sending you a bunch of PMs - if that's ok? i've been a member on xda-devs for many years (a decade maybe?) so will have a search for myself!

I had a Nexus mod on my RX8, however that was just for satnav, and kept the original bose unit in place still... so this is a very new thing

Do you know what the model is under the hood though? I've had a brief look a few months back and noticed there are different models/rebranded etc... does it include wifi/bt? just wondering if i'd need a separate bt module for my odbii

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The unit I have is a KGL variant, 1024x800 screen and RK3188 SOC and is pretty much an Android tablet, mated to some extra hardware for GPS, sound, amp, radio and various USB and SD card ports. In essence, it's not too dissimilar to many of the tablet-in-dash installs, but with all of the external amps, radio bits integrated into one box. Here is a picture of the settings page:

No DIS integration at the moment, but if Alpine can do it, I wouldn't put it past some XDA member with an Audi to come up with a solution for it at some point in the future

Feel free to PM me, but for the benefit of the forum we may want to keep things public, so that others can learn from our experiences/mistakes, plus I can't guarantee that my assistance will be correct as I'm also just starting to learn about these HUs

To add to the info I already posted, here are couple of the wiki articles on the subject and recommended reading for anyone that wants to know more about them. This is probably compulsory reading material for anyone interested in further customization or for troubleshooting issues:

I am not a fan of the NEXT launcher, so went for the ROM that does not have it installed, but it's your choice.

Process to install update below, but for custom Android ROM users this will be familiar:
1. Download the correct OS image and save the unzipped 'update.img' on to the root of a SD card (formatted as Fat32)
2. Insert the SD card into the spare SD slot on the HU and after a little bit of waiting, you will be prompted to install the detected OS update
3. After some waiting and a couple of reboots you will be met with a slightly new launcher and a completely clean HU (you lose all of your settings)
4. Delete the update.img file from the SD to prevent future prompts for updates
5. Got to settings and perform a factory reset & reboot
6. Your OS is now rooted and contains some cool tweaks for you to enjoy - configure to your heart's content

You do not need to update your MCU, I didn't bother (the current MCU version was later than the ones on XDA. Unless you want to tweak the way hardware works (sleep instead of complete power off when key is taken out to speed up boot times, etc)

I love my unit. It's not without its issues and quirks, but you will not find a better set of features for the money.

Good points:
BT works great
Lots of NAV apps to chose from
Lots of available music apps
Great storage expansion
Some integration with mfsw
Lots of inputs for video, as well as reversing and dashcam support
Fit is as close to OEM as you'll ever get without it being OEM
GPS reception and speed is very good
I can go on....

Not so good:
Cold boot is about 30 seconds, although reverse camera works almost immediately and warm boot is instant (5 minutes or so). Can be changed to be longer on some units
Radio reception is OK, but not as good as stock unit
Build quality is a bit meh - it feels on the cheap side
I have very Intermittent screen flicker when it's cold (maybe just my unit)
My unit does not like to come out of the dash due to bad latches, so needs some 'persuasion'
I'm not impressed with sound quality out of the box, from the built-in amp, but this can be fixes as per my previous post

Not for fainthearted - if you never used/rooted Android or don't know how to wire car stereos, this may not be for you

Well on my unit (non-android) I was given a Denison DAB usb unit, so took the opportunity to fit a rear roof DAB/FM/MW aerial, as I needed a DAB aerial, so I now have perfect DAB & good radio reception from the HU should I need it!

I'm pretty sure that my stock ROM allowed side-loading of apps anyway. The main benefits to a rooted ROM and updated MCU are mainly to do with adding ability to modify settings that are not exposed in stock. Some units allow you to change the time out for deep sleep, so you could get instant power-on after hours of unit being switched off, at the expense of extra car battery drain. It also allows for extra mods to be added that require root privileges and many more... Check out the mods section on this page: http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/Hui_Fei_Type

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